State schools need friends

July 11 2003

The public education system is being run down. It needs its supporters to speak up, writes Barry Jones.

Since the 1980s there has been a substantial transfer in public funding away from state schools and towards private schools. The main education issue raised at election times, federally, is that of "choice" in the context of taxation. "Choice", in polly-speak, is coded language for strengthening the private system at the expense of the public system. ("Choice" in health delivery means the same thing).

Education is increasingly being treated as a commodity, a product, and financial considerations often seem as important as content or outcomes. Universities have become trading corporations.

Party spin doctors, on both sides of the political divide, argue that elections are won by appeals to what are now called "aspirational voters". It is assumed that if "aspirationals" are asked, "if you had the choice between paying lower income tax rates that would enable you to send your children to a fee-paying school, OR maintaining tax levels to raise standards in public education, but with fewer opportunities to move your own children", they would pick the first alternative.

However, after the last Costello budget, Newspoll indicated that 75 per cent of respondents would have given up the proposed tax cuts to provide for higher spending in public health, public education and the environment.

Even in cases where parents attended state schools themselves, once they choose to send their children to private schools they generally cease to be effective advocates for the state system. Often such parents say: "I believe in the state system, but Toby and Miranda have special needs, and the private system is able to meet those needs." But if the state system broke down, the impact on our social cohesion would be very serious.");document.write("

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When I attended Melbourne High School in the 1940s, my first principal was Major-General Alan Ramsay, later Sir Alan, who became director of education in Victoria. I noted sourly that his children attended Scotch College and Presbyterian Ladies' College, and I wondered: "Does he know something about the state system that I don't?"

I am constantly surprised by the number of senior teachers in the state system who have opted out for their own progeny.

Often the state system sells itself short: part of the problem is that of sheer size. The Victorian state schools serve a total of 536,800 pupils, and inevitably are often thought of as a collectivity, with an extraordinary range of capacity and diversity in their 1615 schools.

The independent schools, while they coalesce on some issues, sell themselves as individual entities. But quantity invariably changes quality - and attempting to compare 536,800 in a system with 2000 in a single school is both pointless and unfair.

The importance and the strength of the state school system is its universality, and it does well in that uncontested context.

Since the 1980s, the state school system has suffered some (largely unexamined) collateral damage from the ideological shift away from government enterprises - a de facto repudiation of the concept that state-run enterprises operate as an expression of the public good, distinct from the market.

In the past two decades in the West generally, not just in Australia, economics has become not only the dominant intellectual paradigm in public life, but virtually the only one, displacing politics, philosophy and ethics, and making concepts such as the public good, values or diversity seem archaic.

Privatisation and outsourcing have bipartisan support. Both Labor and the Coalition have sold public assets eliminating any distinction between public, non-commercial good and private, commercial benefit, with the exception of churches and charities.

The Commonwealth Bank and state banks were sold, followed by Qantas, airports, railways, some housing; then on to include roads, surplus state school property, prisons, detention centres for illegal immigrants, hospitals and some quasi-police and security services. Universities and the CSIRO retain public ownership but are increasingly run on commercial lines. Telstra is partly, and may soon be totally, privatised. The ABC is under real threat. Australia Post's role is constricted.

Public discourse on privatisation has been remarkably one-sided, and it would be hard to describe it as a debate. Government has taken a self-denying ordinance: "The market knows best. We know nothing."

The case for state involvement in public education is not being forcefully argued - and yet if the state system collapsed, the impact on social cohesion would be immense, and the pressure on the private sector could not easily be met.

If the state gets out of traditional activity, other than tax collection and defence, it might be argued why should the biggest state sector, education, be exempt?

An uncanny silence weakens the strength, legitimacy and confidence of the state education system. It needs strong public advocacy.

Barry Jones, a former state school teacher, federal Labor minister and national president of the ALP, is chairman of the Victorian Schools Innovation Commission. This is an edited extract of his speech yesterday to the Australian College of Educators national conference on the Sunshine Coast.